The British Criminology Conferences: Selected Proceedings. Volume 1: Emerging Themes in Criminology. Papers from the British Criminology Conference, Loughborough University, 18-21 July 1995. This volume published September 1998. Editors: Jon Vagg and Tim Newburn. ISSN 1464-4088. See end of file for copyright and other information. 'BANG!' GOES THE NEIGHBOURHOOD: FIREARMS, VIOLENCE AND SOCIAL DISORDER Peter Squires Introduction This paper was originally written during the first part of 1995 and delivered to the Loughborough conference in July 1995, some eight months before the horrific events of 13 March 1996 in Dunblane. Before 1996, Britain's most infamous peacetime firearm incident occurred in Hungerford when Michael Ryan, having already killed 16 people and injured several more with his combination of weapons, a Kalashnikov assault rifle, an M1 carbine and a Beretta pistol, was cornered in a local school classroom. Shortly before 7pm the surrounding police heard a single muffled shot. Entering the building they discovered Ryan's body (Josephs 1993). The several connections between Hungerford and Dunblane have received much attention in the past year, and the unheeded lessons of the late 1980s are apparent to most commentators. The contrasting social, political and, ultimately, legislative responses to both events, and their longer term significance, will undoubtedly remain a subject of more than merely academic enquiry for many years to come. Back in 1995, however, I sought with this paper to engage in a wider debate about firearms, violence and society. The general objective of this paper is to review recent debates about the problems of firearm violence in the USA and the UK, before turning to consider contrasting discourses of gun control. The paper posits a general assumption about civil society confronted by the problem of the gun. Thus the paper endeavours to engage in a wider debate about post-modern society in which firearm use and abuse are both cause and symptom of wider tensions relating to the breakdown of forms of collective security, epidemic levels of fear and insecurity, social fragmentation and division, individualism, crime and violence. The paper has been edited and revised since July 1995 in order to take proper account of important issues emerging since March 1996. However, it retains its original focus. It is not, primarily, a discussion of Dunblane or the UK gun control debate that followed. Civilisation, authority and violence The invention of the firearm played a vital role in the establishment of modern nation states. In turn, the process of industrialisation reinforced the growing power of these states by equipping their enlarged armies with the firepower to subdue the world. However, in the post- industrial world, the state's relative monopoly of domestic firepower may have been broken in the USA and many parts of Europe whilst facing a developing challenge in the UK. A dangerous new situation has been created and the gun is causing a new kind of havoc. Political interventions into the crime problem in both Britain and America frequently stress community and neighbourhood values as potential solutions to the crisis of violence and public disorder yet it is frequently in the most violent and beleaguered neighbourhoods that firearm violence has made the greatest inroads (see for example Canada 1995). A distinctive feature of the modern form of governing has been the effective monopolisation of legitimate force in the hands of the state. There is, no doubt, something of a tautology here for, as Walter Benjamin observed, echoing Shakespeare, 'legitimacy' is one of the spoils that usually accrue to the victor. There is, of course, usually far more to it in practice. Consolidation of the means of violence and the establishment of collective security must rank as the first foundations of liberal governance. One need not accept the central premises of contract theory; it is enough to acknowledge its powerful ideological legacy. Thus, for Hobbes, singular authority ended the war of all against all. For Locke this legitimate authority established the order of life, liberty and property and, later, for Blackstone, it sought to enshrine the doctrine of personal security without which all other rights were meaningless. With Blackstone, however, the principle of the right of individuals to collective security was placed in tension with another, the right of individuals to protect themselves if threatened. The different evolution of this Common Law principle in English and American conditions is worth noting. In the latter context, the conditions of frontier society, and a mixture of individualism, egalitarianism and republican resistance sponsored a much stronger 'right to self defence' than was tolerated under English Law (Brown 1991). [1] In the discursive 'space' between these contrasting resolutions of the authority and order problem, two distinct approaches to the issue of collective security emerged which, in their own ways, have become more problematic in recent years (see McDowell and Loftin 1983). The first approach concerns the idea of security and justice as public goods which cannot be rationally and efficiently allocated by private market mechanisms. To some extent this presumption has already been challenged, in theory and practice, on both sides of the Atlantic and in post-apartheid South Africa (Cohen 1990). In the USA, South Africa, and in large third- world cities such as Rio de Janeiro, perimeter security cordons, armed private police forces and state of the art access control systems guard down-town business districts, tourist-rich locations, and up-market residential enclaves. In Britain, where the commitment to collective security has been more enduring, although private sector policing has been one of the fastest growth industries (South 1988), the idea of privatised personal or residential security, whilst widespread in the business and retail sectors, has not yet made such dramatic inroads into more conventional policing tasks. More recently, we have witnessed an emerging neo-liberal (or republican) critique of collective security as a concept. In the US, this critique has been tightly tied into the debate over Second Amendment rights to own and carry firearms. More recently the debate has broadened out to cover the post-Vietnam, anti-federal, 'survivalist' groups and the variety of paramilitary organisations which, since Waco and Oklahoma, and the Clinton Administration's gun-control measures, have been an especial focus of concern. The advocates of this 'new republicanism' drew upon the neo-liberal, even libertarian, arguments that 'social justice' is a mirage (Hayek 1976), 'society' no more than an aggregate of individuals (Nozick 1974) and 'collectivism' a dangerous, passive and stultifying form of unfreedom (Joseph and Sumption 1979, Letwin 1983). The alternative suggested by Nozick involved the idea of private protection agencies, supported by public subscription, and flourishing or failing according to market principles (Nozick 1974: 12-15). The irony for Nozick was precisely, in his view, the tendency of private protection agencies to amalgamate and ultimately to monopolise the exercise of coercive force, thereby establishing a new basis for the minimalist state. The fact that this supposed tendency towards monopolisation is detected by Nozick, yet nowhere in his work specifically rejected as undesirable, takes us to the second approach to the problem of collective security, namely the question of its legitimacy. In place of the single social contract of authority, Nozick substitutes a multitude of individual contracts of choice. Clearly, forms of legitimation are crucial to each approach. The legitimacy of state collectivist forms of security rested upon periodic democratic legitimation and 'consent'; the implied endorsement given to legal codes and the systems of rights and obligations they established for citizens. Only a single sovereign authority could guarantee such 'rights', or indeed take them away. The conquest of violence or new forms of power? Another important feature of the exercise of governing power in the modern age is, as Foucault has noted, the economy of its exercise; efficiency, invisibility, and the absence of overt force through the constitution of docile, malleable bodies (Foucault 1977). Even so, the attainment of 'civilised hegemony' frequently relied upon quite explicit forms of violence and warfare. As Mestrovic has suggested, following Foucault and others, there is no reason for assuming that civilisation, by itself, is a humanizing force (Mestrovic 1993: 41). Where the contractual model of civil society expels explicit force and violence to the margins - the 'darkness on the edge of town' - then, arguably, so does Foucault. Liberal historiography has portrayed this development as a 'conquest of violence' (Critchley 1970), or as a 'demand for order in civil society' (Silver 1967). In contrast we should surely argue that violence and disorder have only been displaced or decentred, though perhaps national differences in the social processes involved have generated quite different national attitudes to firearms (Tonso 1982). This is not the place to cover in detail the processes of state formation or the new modes of citizenship governance which led to the consolidation of democratic patriarchal authority. In short, however, the definitive feature of our modern civilisation concerned its new methods of industrial production, and these new methods